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Updated: Jul 29, 2026

Emission Spectroscopic Boundary Layer Investigation during Ablative Material Testing in Plasmatron
Published on: June 9, 2016
Quantitative measurement and comparison of breakthroughs inside the gas diffusion layer using lattice Boltzmann
Hossein Pourrahmani1, Milad Hosseini2, Hamza Moussaoui3
1Group of Energy Materials, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1951, Sion, Switzerland. hossein.pourrahmani@epfl.ch.
Abstract:
In Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEMFCs), the presence of residual water within the Gas Diffusion Layer (GDL) poses challenges during cold starts and accelerates degradation. A computational model based on the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) was developed to consider the capillary pressure inside the PEMFC and to analyze the exact geometries of the GDLs, which were obtained using the Computed Tomography scan. The novelty of this study is to suggest a methodology to compare the quantitative water removal performance of the GDLs without long-term experimental testing. Two different samples of GDLs were considered, pristine and aged. The results of quantitative measurements revealed the amount of water columns (breakthroughs) inside each sample. Considering the volume of 12,250,000 µm3 for each sample, the pristine and the aged samples are prone to have 774,200 µm3 (6.32%) and 1,239,700 µm3 (10.12%) as water columns in their porous domain. Micro-structural properties such as connectivity, mean diameter, effective diffusivity, etc. were also compared to observe the impacts of aging on the properties of the GDL.
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